Gervase Markham wrote:
>
> 2) Find a thing lots of people are trying to do, and make sure the new
> spec provides a simple way to do it, which may or may not be related
> markup-wise to the way they are doing it now.
I think you have to qualify this by considering what the purpose of HTML
is. A lot of people are trying to use it as a page description language
(HTML more fashionable than PDF, browser more likely to be installed
than Acrobat, basic authoring tools are a lot cheaper (originally
free)). A lot of people are trying to use it as a GUI applications
programming environment (not compiled so easier to plagiarise,
guaranteed execution platform, IT managers seem to tolerate it more than
.NET CLR or Java. The result tends to be bloated, difficult to
maintain code, relying on side effects.
Rather than make HTML cover those applications, users should be educated
to use PDLs, for the former, and .NET or Java for the latter.